A number of college students in forensic debate may be deterred from debating broad topics due to a lack of appropriate cognitive development and a perception of unacceptable certainty. These students have failed to develop formal thinking patterns because they lack reinforcing experiences in reasoning at that level. A sequenced pattern of…

This article presents 10 practical teaching procedures to encourage students to develop formal reasoning skills. A twelfth-grade English course is used as an example. Procedures include pretesting, sequencing instruction, providing students with concrete experiences, discussing reasoning patterns and forms of argumentation, assigning argumentative…

A unit designed to cover the topic of genetic engineering and its ethical considerations is presented. Students are expected to learn the material while using a debate format. A list of objectives for the unit, the debate format, and the results from an opinion questionnaire are described. (KR)